understanding how our brain works and developing personalized therapies for its diseases
Visit eBRAIN-Health
eBrain-Health will deliver a distributed research platform for modeling and simulating complex neurobiological phenomena of human brain function and dysfunction, in a data protection compliant environment. It will provide thousands of multilevel virtual brains from both patients and healthy human controls for research and innovation.
Brain data from multiple sources will be pre-processed. Solving the societal grand challenge of dementia is a big task. Yet, it appears feasible in a collective approach. Therefore, we will build an interdisciplinary digital twin for dementia for modeling and simulating complex phenomena at the service of research infrastructure communities.
eBRAIN-Health constitutes a blend of three large-scale research programs:
- the FET Flagship Human Brain Project with its EBRAINS Research Infrastructure and Health Data Cloud,
- the EOSC project Virtual Brain Cloud with its Virtual Research Environment for sensitive data, and
- the H2020 project AI-MIND with intelligent tools for dementia risk estimation.
The project will have synergies to topics of the Digital Europe Program, such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and supercomputing and the Health Data Space.
EBRAINS-Health-Cloud offers a next generation clinical research infrastructure and creates an open yet protected space for ground-breaking digital health innovation by the research infrastructure communities comprising academia and the private sector.
eBRAIN-Health Organisation
project structure
- Overall Coordination [lead: CHARITÉ]
- Ethics & Legal [lead: UNIVIE]
- Integration and Platform [lead: CHARITÉ]
- Ontologies and Knowledge-Graphs [lead: FRAUNHOFER]
- Data and Workflows [lead: FZJ]
- Biophysical Modeling [lead: UPF]
- Applications and 3D Visualization [lead: SRU]
- Big Data Analytics [lead: OUS]
- Use-Case [lead: CHARITÉ]
- Exploitation & Dissemination [lead: EBRAINS]
- Management [lead: TP21]
Diseases and Therapies
Deep Brain Stimulation
'Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a form of therapy for treating neurological movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease. Very thin electrodes are implanted in the patient’s brain and constantly deliver mild electrical pulses to a specific region. The electrodes remain in the brain permanently and are connected via wires that run under the skin to a pacemaker-like device implanted in the chest area. The device is used to adjust the strength and frequency of the electrical stimulation. DBS works very well in patients with Parkinson’s. It improves their quality of life significantly. Since Alzheimer’s is also a neurodegenerative disease, it seems likely that DBS could be used to treat this condition, too. But safe, effective treatment is only possible if the precise brain regions that require stimulation are known.'